The Evolving Leader

Leading With Radical Candor with Kim Scott

• Kim Scott • Season 7 • Episode 1

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In this episode of The Evolving Leader podcast, co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender are in conversation with Kim Scott. Kim is the author of the best selling ‘Radical Candor, How To Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean’ (2017), ‘Just Work: How to Confront Bias, Prejudice and Bullying to Build a Culture of Inclusivity’ (2021) and the more recently published ‘Radical Respect, How to Work Together Better’ (2024). Kim was a CEO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrix and Twitter and she hosts the Radical Candor and Radical Respect podcast.

Referenced during this episode:
Radical Candor, How To Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean
Radical Respect, How to Work Together Better

Other reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender:
Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, 2023)
The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, 2023)

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The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

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Jean Gomes:

The ability to have a truly open, honest, vulnerable conversation in the pursuit of something that we deeply care about represents one of the most joyous experiences of work, feeling cared for and caring about others, but not letting that limit your ability to express fears or concerns or hold back on sharing ideas in their infancy. How can we get more of that into everyday work? In this show, we talk to Kim Scott, who has had a remarkable career working with some of the tech industry's most iconic and influential leaders. She's witnessed the full spectrum of leadership behavior, good and bad, and she's put that experience into practice in building her own successful enterprises. And then at 50, she decided to give back and solidify her experiences into a teachable picture of what the heart of a good relationship could be between a leader and their employees, and the answer was radical candor. The title of a globally best selling book. In this wonderful conversation, Kim shares the experiences that formed her thinking and the practical tools that will make every leader better. These tools are not just theoretical, but can be implemented in real world situations, helping leaders to retain their Integrity and humanity. Tune in for a great show you.

Scott Allender:

You. Hey folks, welcome to the evolving leader, a show born from the belief that we need deeper, more accountable and more human leadership to confront the world's biggest challenges. I'm Scott Allender and I'm John Gomes. How are you feeling, Mr. Gomes,

Jean Gomes:

I am feeling really well. I've had a week off in the Lake District in the UK, climbing fells with my wife, and since the first time, I think in 20 years, that we've had a holiday on our own without children. So that was really brilliant, and the place was brilliant. So I'm full of full of energy and positivity as a result of that. So yeah,

Scott Allender:

I saw your I saw some of your photos, and they look amazing. Look beautiful. It's an incredible

Jean Gomes:

part of the world. So, Scott, how you feeling? Yeah,

Scott Allender:

well, I feeling like I need to go where you went, but I still somehow I'm feeling quite energized today. I'm feeling really, really excited to be joined by our guest. Today. We've got a really good show ahead, because today we welcome Kim Scott to the podcast. Kim is the author of the well known book radical candor. Be a kick ass boss without losing your humanity. And co founder of the company radical candor, and her new book is called Radical respect, how to work together better. Kim was a CEO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter and other tech companies. She was a member of the faculty at Apple University, and before that, led AdSense, YouTube and doubleclick teams at Google. And prior to that, Kim managed a pediatric clinic in Kosovo and started a diamond cutting factory in Moscow. She also hosts the radical candor and radical respect podcast. Kim, welcome to the evolving leader.

Kim Scott:

Thank you so much. I'm really excited for our conversation today.

Jean Gomes:

Kim, welcome to the show. How you feeling today?

Kim Scott:

You know, I also was hiking in lakes, but a different in Banff, Canada, Lake Louise and Moraine Lake, and oh my gosh, I'm feeling inspired by nature. That's how I'm feeling. It's so beautiful. So I was there with my husband and kids. So it was fun.

Jean Gomes:

So what wonderful way of opening your mind up, isn't it?

Kim Scott:

Yeah, it really is. I mean, it was my mind is wide open, blown wide open.

Jean Gomes:

So before we dive into your work, and there's a lot to cover, I just have to pick up on this. You know, started a diamond cutting factory in Moscow to just what

Kim Scott:

yes as one does so. So I was, I graduated college in 1990 and so I was in college from 84 to from 8086 to 90. Yeah, only four years in college, and was studying arms control, I was very concerned about the fate of the earth at that point and whether we would blow ourselves up. And I then the Berlin Wall fell my senior year of college, and the whole problem seemed to have resolved itself, unfortunately, as we're seeing now, it hadn't. Resolved itself, but that was what we thought at the time. And so then I got interested into swords and into plowshares, and I moved to Moscow, and I was doing this project, and then the working for a financial management company, and then the coup happened, and the company decided to take its money and invest it in China, not in Russia, but I wanted to stay in Russia. So I was scrambling around, looking for another job, and through a friend of a friend, I got this job with this New York based company called lazara Kaplan, and we, I started up a diamond cutting factory for them in Moscow. And it wasn't like, totally untrue. It was in the Fort Knox of Russia, you know. So we're partnering with the government, so it wasn't like off with the mafia or anything. Yeah,

Jean Gomes:

it's a great, it's a great thing to have on your CV, yeah, yeah. How did, let's, let's move from there. How did you navigate into what you're doing right now?

Kim Scott:

You know, it probably all started, actually, when I when I was hiring the people to work in that diamond cutting factory I had, I'd studied Russian literature and arms control in college, and I thought business was boring. And I was like, all you do is you pay people and they work for you. And I thought, this is going to be really easy, because the ruble is collapsing and the dollar is really strong, and so I'm just going to tell these people what I'm going to pay them, and they're going to come work for me. But that wasn't how it worked. They didn't just want money. They wanted to have a picnic. I'm like, All right, well, you know, I can do a picnic too. We went out to have this and by the time we're finished with this bottle of vodka, what I realized that I could do for them, that the state could not do for them was to give a damn to be a human being and to build relationships with them, what they really wanted to know. And as you can imagine, since the invasion of Ukraine, I've been thinking a lot about these people. They wanted to know that someone would help them get out if things went sideways in Russia and and so that is that that was what I could do, is I could build relationships with them and relationships. That's why I studied Russian literature and art, like I care about relationships now, all of a sudden, management seemed really interesting, not really boring. So that was, that was sort of how I got interested in management. After another couple of years in Moscow, there was I read an article one day that one one banking group had beheaded the heads of the executives of another banking group and put them on stakes on the suburbs of Moscow. I decided this is not the kind of capitalism I'm interested in practicing. So I left and went to business school, and then, and then wound up starting, starting a couple of companies, both of which failed, and I went to Google that worked out a lot better. And then after a few years at Google, I realized the thing I really cared about was not cost per click, but was the opportunity to build a team on which everybody could do the best work of their lives and build the best relationships of their careers. And so I went to Apple to Steve Jobs had decided they were going to throw away all their management training and start from a blank piece of paper. And a professor of mine from business school had had left academia and joined Apple, and he said, Kim, come help me, because I've never actually, you know, built a team or a company. And so I left Google and went to Apple to build this class called Managing at Apple, with my professor, Richard tedlow, and a couple of other people who are who had been at Apple for a long time, and then, and then, you know, the next thing that happened was a friend of mine from Google became CEO of Twitter, Dick Costolo, and he said, Well, come help me build managing at Twitter. And lo and behold, managing at Twitter was exactly the same thing as managing it. I mean, people are people, certainly at Twitter and apple, but there really people are people everywhere. It's not it doesn't matter so much the industry. And that was when I decided to sit down and write radical candor to put my ideas into practice as I became his coach and a few other people's coach. But you know, I'm a human being, and I don't scale and I figured a book with a way to scale myself.

Scott Allender:

So let's talk about that book, because, all right, radical candor has been called, you know, a must read for any manager who wants to create an environment where people feel safe to speak their minds and get their jobs done and feel respected. And I'm betting that many in our audience have read this book, but for anyone who hasn't, let's, let's hear the pitch. If we could, why'd you write it? Who's it? Who's it aimed at? And why do you think it has resonated so well with so many of our or so many readers?

Kim Scott:

I wrote radical candor, in part, just because I love to write. In fact, my whole business career was one giant plan to subsidize my novel writing habit, and I had written several novels now. Of which got published. And one of my mentors was Andy Grove, who was the CEO of Intel, and also wanted to be a writer, but found he couldn't support himself that way. And he wrote some great management books, and he said that he really encouraged me to sit down and write the book. He said, If you write down what you've learned about being a great leader, then, then you'll enjoy it, and it'll help a lot of people. So, so I did it, and I think partly I wrote it for my younger self, because and I don't think I'm alone in this, when I first became a manager, I was co founder and CEO of a software startup, and I had gone to business school where I had learned exactly nothing about managing people. All I had learned, you know, I learned a lot about finance and operations and marketing, but not about managing people. And I think too often folks assume that leadership and management, first of all, they assume they're two different things, and it's their forehand and backhand you need to be able to do both. But they assume that these are innate traits that a person is born with, and I don't think that's true. They're things that can be learned. And so I also wrote it for other other leaders who become managers for the first time, or maybe there are already CEOs and and they they need to learn quickly, because if they fail, they're going to drag a whole team down with them.

Jean Gomes:

We were talking before the We the interview started about the fact that your framework is now probably, at this very moment, being used flashed up in front of management teams, leadership groups 1000s of times across the world. How does that feel to know that this this you've kind of coined something in people's minds that has had such an effect on them.

Kim Scott:

You know, it feels very validating because it first of all, when I was teaching at Apple, I had a different version of the two by two framework, and it didn't quite work as well. But I wasn't quite sure what was wrong and but I didn't have time to really figure out how to get it right. I was very busy. And so when I left and started writing the book, I spent three full months doing nothing other than tweaking the words on on the on the axes and in each of the four quadrants, to the extent my husband thought I had lost my mind. He said, I can build you a random word generator, like so I didn't know, and at the time, it felt like an indulgence. I felt like I was scratching an itch, and I wasn't sure if it was going to be productive or not productive. So it's, I'm very happy that it has helped people, because I think a lot of people struggle. That's the thing you do when you write. You know you you think deeply about I think the definition of poetry is what oft was thought but narrow, so well expressed, and and I was lucky that I had the capacity to spend three full months just thinking about this to get it right. And so I'll, should I describe the framework that you're talking about. Yeah.

Jean Gomes:

I mean, I think, I think it would be really great to do that. And I think in this, you know, one of the things that you are very clear about this is a behavioral framework. This is not a Personality Typing, yes, which some people do, you know, unfortunately fall into the trap of describing people in these things as types, rather than as a behavioral response to a situation. So yeah, Can you Can we walk through the framework?

Kim Scott:

Sure. So if you on the vertical axis is care personally, and on the horizontal axis is challenged directly, and when you can do both at the same time, it's radical candor. Why do I call it radical? Because it's very rare. Everyone I've ever worked with has struggled with feedback at work, and all of us in different ways. But it's it is very counter, counter intuitive. I think our instinct is not to say the thing that we that it is our job to say. So that's right, and why do I call it candor and not truth? Because candor implies, here's how I understand the situation. I also want to know how you it's not if I charge in and say I'm going to tell you the truth, I'm kind of implying like I've got a pipeline to God, and you don't know shit from Shinola. And that's not a great way for us to start a conversation, right? So, so that's radical candor. What is it? Not some and we all make these mistakes, probably multiple times a day. Sometimes we remember to challenge directly, but we forget to show that we care personally about someone, and that is what I call obnoxious aggression and a mistake that all of us make. And by the way, in the first draft. Of the book in one of the many iterations of this two by two framework. I called that the asshole quadrant. I just that was how I labeled it. But I stopped doing it for a very important reason. I stopped doing that because it caused people to start to write names and boxes in this two by two framework. And I beg of people, please don't do that as as as John just said, this is a behavioral framework. This is not another Myers Briggs Personality Test. These are mistakes that all of us make all the time. So use this framework to guide specific conversations with specific people to a better place. Now, obnoxious aggression is a big problem. It's a problem for a lot of reasons. It's a problem mostly because it hurts other people. It's also a problem because it's inefficient. If I'm a jerk to you, Scott, then you are likely to go into fight or flight mode, and then you literally cannot hear the words that are coming out of my mouth, so I am wasting my breath. So that's a big problem. It's also a problem for a third reason, because I don't know about you all, you can tell me how you respond, but when I realize I have landed in obnoxious aggression, and again, I don't think I'm alone. It's not my instinct to go the right way on care personally. Instead, it's my instinct to go the wrong way on challenge directly, and then I wind up in the worst place of all, where I'm neither caring nor challenging. And that's where I call manipulative insincerity. That's where passive, aggressive behavior, political behavior, all of the things that erode trust most quickly in an organization creep in. And it's funny to think about when we, when we when we talk about things going wrong at work or really in any relationship in our life, we tend to talk about these two behaviors, about obnoxious aggression and to manipulative insincerity, because that's where the drama is. In fact, it's also where the cynicism is. There was a whole episode of the HBO show Silicon Valley dedicated to radical candor. But of course, what it was really about was obnoxious aggression and manipulative sincerity, not radical candor. And so because that's where the drama is. That's what we talk about. But that is those are not the mistakes that most of us make most of the time. The vast majority of people make the vast majority of mistakes up in this last quadrant, where we remember to show that we care personally, but we're so worried about not hurting someone's feelings or offending them that we don't tell them something they'd be better off knowing in the long run, and that is what I call ruinous empathy. So that's the TLDR of radical candor. But please do read it. It's you know, care personally on the vertical axis, challenge directly on the horizontal radical candor, obnoxious aggression, manipulative insincerity and ruinous empathy.

Scott Allender:

When you work with teams in this I love this model. When you work with teams, How easy do you find it it is for people to identify where they tend to go. You know, I work with people in leadership, coaching and whatnot, and oftentimes there's a lot of blind spots. People don't know that they're being manipulative or perceived that way, or they're don't know that they're being too aggressive. How do you help people? Or do you find it even a challenge for people to see themselves honestly, and then what does it take to move them into the sort of top right quadrant where they ideally need to be?

Kim Scott:

It's interesting. We often poll people and and most people will say, I make most of my mistakes in ruinous sympathy. So they know they're doing that. I think that it sometimes, but comparatively rarely, I'll work with a team and they'll say, Oh, our problem is obnoxious aggression. You know, we're a bunch of jerks and that. And that was true. They were correct. They were very self aware that particular team, but they knew it was a problem. They were trying to fix it. So I give them all kinds of credit. Very rarely do we admit when we're being manipulatively insincere. That is the hardest thing for people to self identify. And in fact, I tell a story that shows how complicated this is. And when I first started telling the story, I told it as a ruinous empathy story. And then as I started thinking about it, I'm like, I'm not being totally honest with myself. You know, you want, should I lay it on you? You want to hear the story? Yeah, let's do it all right. So, so this, this was one of the most painful moments in my career. I had, I had just hired this guy. Will call him Bob. And I liked Bob a lot. He was smart, he was charming, he was funny. He would do stuff like, we're at a manager off site playing one of those endless get to know you games. And Bob was a guy who had the courage to raise his hand and to say, I can tell everyone is stressed out and wants to get back to work. I've got an idea. It'll help us get to know each other, and it'll be really fast. Now, whatever his idea was, if it was really fast, we were down with it. He's Bob says, let's just go around the table and confess what candy our parents used when potty training us. I don't know if this happens everywhere in the world, but in the US parents bribe their kids to didn't happen. Yeah, poop in the poop in the potty and and weirder, you know, really weird, but really fast, weirder yet, everybody remembered, you know, Hershey Kisses right here. And so for the next 10 months, every time there was a tense moment in the meeting, Bob would pull out just the right piece of candy for the right person at the right moment. So Bob brought a little levity to the office. He was, yeah, he was, he was quirky, but he was, he was funny. One problem with Bob, he was doing terrible work, absolutely terrible work. I was so puzzled, because he had this incredible resume, this history of accomplishments. I learned much later, the problem was that Bob was smoking pot in the bathroom three times a day, which maybe explained all that candy he had with but I didn't know any of that at the time. All I knew is that Bob was handing work into me, and there was shame in his eyes. He knew it wasn't nearly good enough and and I would say something to Bob along the lines of, Oh, Bob, you're so awesome. We all love working with you. You're so smart. This is a great start. Maybe you could make it just a little bit better, which, of course, he never did. So let's pause for a moment and sort of parse the ruin of sympathy and the manipulative insincerity there. Part of me really liked Bob and really didn't want to hurt his feelings. That was part of what was going on, and that was the ruinous empathy, just the reluctance to upset him. However, if I'm honest with myself, there was something more insidious going on, because Bob was popular, and Bob was also kind of sensitive. And so there was part of me that was afraid that if I told Bob in no uncertain terms that his work wasn't nearly good enough, he might get upset, he might even start to cry, and then everyone would think I was a big you know what? So the part of me that was worried about my reputation as a leader was the manipulative and sincerity part. It was. I was really not saying it to Bob, not to protect his feelings, but to protect my reputation as a leader. The part of me that was really genuinely worried about Bob's feelings, and that was also true, that was the ruin of sympathy part. And this went on for 10 months, and eventually the inevitable happened, and I realized that if I didn't fire Bob, I was going to lose all my best performers. Because not only had I been unfair to Bob not to tell him, all these months, I had been unfair to the whole team, and people were frustrated their deliverables were late. Because Bob's deliverables were late. They were not able to do their best work because they were having to spend so much time redoing Bob's work, and if I didn't fix it, the people who are best at their jobs were going to quit. So I sat down, had the conversation with Bob that I should have started, frankly, 10 months previously, and when I finished explaining to him how things stood. He sort of pushed his chair back from the from the table, and he looked me right in the eye, and he said, Why didn't you tell me? And as that question was going around in my head with no good answer, he looked at me again and he said, Why didn't anyone tell me? I thought you all cared about me. And now I realize that by not being radically candid with Bob, thinking I was being so nice, I'm having to fire him as a result of it. Not so nice, after all, it was a painful moment. It was painful for me. It was much worse for Bob. It was bad for the whole team, and it was bad for our investors, because we weren't getting stuff done that we needed to get done, and, and, but it was too late to say Bob, because even Bob, at this point thought he should go, his reputation on the team was just shot. All I could do in the moment was make myself a very solemn promise that I would never make that mistake again, and that I would never that I would do everything I could to help other people avoid making that mistake, because I think it is the most common leadership slash management mistake that that we make, and that's really a big that was one of the many mistakes. That prompted me to write this book, and

Jean Gomes:

I think that story and the many others that you tell in the book highlight the fact that this framework looks simple, but actually you've throws a net over a lot of complex, knotty paradoxes. Yeah, leader leaders face, which is why it's such a powerful framework. But can we can we talk about radical candor in the context of this rapidly changing set of social norms that we're facing now that leaders have to deal with? You know, did we see, for example, an outbreak of ruinous empathy around topics like Black Lives Matter or trans rights because leaders weren't confident about the issues and were pushed into these suboptimal positions. What's your take on that?

Kim Scott:

I don't think I would call that manipulative insincerity, not ruinous empathy, right? Like if I'm if I'm a white leader and I have a black employee, and I'm afraid to give that black employee feedback, because I am afraid of being called racist, if I do, then I am being manipulatively insincere. I am not concerned about that person like it is my job to give that black employee the same kind of feedback that I give every other employee, and so if I don't give them feedback because I'm afraid of being called racist, then I would say I'm being manipulatively insincere, not ruinously empathetic. And this is, this is not a new problem, actually. In fact, Claude Steele, in his wonderful book whistling, Vivaldi writes about this. He describes how important when he describes being the only only black student in his PhD program. And he describes how important feedback from his academic advisor was to sort of succeeding in this environment where where he felt, you know, very isolated, often and and he also describes how often people don't give their black employees that kind of feedback, and what a disservice it is to them. There's a there's a term for it, coined by David Thomas, who's the president of Morehouse College, and he calls this protective hesitation, which is a nicer way of calling it manipulative and sincerity, but I think that is is important to to recognize, and I will say I didn't touch nearly enough on the ways that our different biases In the ways that prejudice and the ways that bullying get in the way of radical candor, which prompted me to write my next book, radical respect, before

Scott Allender:

we jump into radical respect, because I want to talk all about that as well. I'm actually curious as well. Do you how do you see the sort of with AI changing the workplace? You know what it's already done and what it will do. But what is the role of radical candor? How do people use radical candor to kind of navigate through this evolution?

Kim Scott:

Well, I mean, I it is my belief that that management, if I sort of paint a picture of what your job as a manager is, you are at the center and so. And a wheel where the center is out of alignment does not spin fast. So not only for your own sake, but for your whole team's sake, it's important for you to stay centered and and then the next concentric circle is your relationship, your the relationship that you have with each of your direct reports, I think, the atomic building block of of human collaboration is a relationship. Are these relationships? And the atomic building block of your success as a manager slash leader is is the relationship that you form with each of your direct reports. And that is something that AI will not I mean, I don't think we're going to have relationships with robots anytime soon, and so that, I think, is really important you can use AI to be more effective. That Textio is a company that offers a program that will take a look at your performance reviews and flag bias for you, for example, I was just chatting with the CEO of Otter AI, and there's a really interesting report that you can get at the end of every meeting if you're recording it using otter AI, and it'll tell you what percentage of Time in the meeting, you spoke, whether you're talking too much or you know too little, and what percentage everyone spoke. It's really one of your jobs, I think, as a leader, is to make sure, is to give the quiet ones a voice, as Johnny Ive, who was the who was at who's at Apple, said, so I think you want to make. Sure that you're that you're using AI to to give yourself some feedback, to become more self aware, and there are different ways. We're also developing an AI tool that will help you. People hate doing role plays, but they don't seem to mind doing it with a robot because they feel less judged, and so it'll help you practice conversations. And a lot of people find it incredibly helpful to understand how their words are coming across today. And so you can feed the AI tool. You can describe your direct report their personality, because it's going to be different. Medical care is an end to end problem. Everybody who practice it is different, and everybody they're talking to is different. So you can be you can say the same thing to four different people, and one person will interpret it as radical candor. Another will experience it as obnoxious, aggression. Another will not hear you at all and experience it as ruinous empathy, and a fourth person will experience it as manipulative and sincerity. And that's part of the complexity of the model is, is that it's not, there's not one objective. It's it's relational. And so I think AI can help with that. We're also building a one of the one of the reasons I wrote the book was that so many people, after I started coaching Dick Costolo at Twitter. A lot of people wanted me to be their coach, and I'm a human being, and I do not scale, and I'm not going to try to scale. I only have so many hours in the day, and I need a lot of sleep, and I need a lot of time to read and whatnot. So what we're doing is we're building fake Kim Scott, F, A, i, k, Kim Scott and and fake Kim Scott does scale. And you know, I would say the answers that fake Kim Scott gives right now, or maybe, you know, I give it maybe a, b, b plus, but that's pretty damn good, honestly. And so we're working on getting it at least to an A minus, and then we're going to launch it and and let other people give fake Kim's got a lot of feedback, and we'll see, see what happens. So I think there's a lot of different ways that that we'll be able to use AI to become better managers and to become more self aware, a lot of ideas I'm sure I haven't had yet. You know, we're very early on in this journey. However, I will say AI is not going to substitute for managers. Because what the thing like, let's go back to that diet that the thing I learned as I would finish the bottle of vodka with the diamond cutters, the thing they wanted that the state could not give them was a relationship they wanted to have. And Google learned this early on. They tried to get rid of managers because, you know, managers have a bad reputation in the world and and what happened was it didn't work. People actually want managers. They just don't want bad managers. And so I think the thing that Google did, and the thing that I think was genius and that every organization should do, is that they stripped away power from managers because a little power corrupt absolute. Power corrupts absolutely a little. Power corrupts a lot, which is why there's not a good word for leader, manager, boss. All of these words have negative or negative valence, words, I think, in different ways we I mean to me, at least. I'd love to get your all's thoughts on this too. And so one of the goals with radical candor is to figure out how to have good relationships between bosses and employees, managers and employees, leaders and employees, so that the word becomes so that we get, once we get better leaders, the word will have a positive connotation, not a negative connotation. I hope,

Jean Gomes:

yeah, well, I mean, just reflection on that, you know, I hate being called a boss, yes, because it, you know, like I had a, I think, a problematic view of being in that relationship in the past, which I think most of us have, to one, one extent or another. But I think, rather than trying to, I think your point here about, rather than trying to find a new word, actually make the existing word positive. Yes, yes. Much, much, much better. You. Kerby, so let's turn to your latest book, radical respect. Can you talk to us about, you know, what it's aiming to solve in terms of its objective? Sure.

Kim Scott:

So I decided to write a. Shortly after radical candor came out, you know, if you write a book about feedback, you're going to get a lot of it, and indeed, I did, and hands down, the best feedback came when I was doing a radical candor talk at a tech company in San Francisco, and the CEO of that company had been a colleague of mine for the better part of a decade. She's a person I like and respect enormously. So I was really excited to give this talk, and when I finished doing the talk, she pulled me aside and she said, Kim, I'm excited to roll out radical candor, but it's a lot harder for me to roll it out than it is for you. And she went on to explain to me that as a black woman, as soon as she would offer anyone even the most gentle compassionate criticism, they would immediately call her an angry black woman, and as soon as she said this to me, I felt like grabbing my head because I knew it was true. I knew how unfair I could think of times that had happened to her. I knew how unfair it was because she's the most even keeled, cheerful person I've ever worked with. And as soon as she said this to me, I had four realizations at the same time that prompted me to write radical respect. And these four, I realized I had played four different roles at different points in my career, sometimes all at the same time, and these became kind of the organ organizing structures of the book. So the first thing that I realized was that I had not been the kind of colleague that I imagined myself to be I want to be. I see myself as an upstander, a person who will intervene when I notice somebody being treated disrespectfully, and yet I had failed to do that for her. The second thing that I realized was that not only had I sort of been in denial about the kinds of things that were happening to her, I had also been in denial about the kinds of things that were happening to me in the workplace, and so as a person harmed, I had not chosen a response. I had just pretended that a whole host of things were not happening that were, in fact happening. Kind of hard for the author of a book called Radical candor to admit, but there it was, because it was hard to think about that. Yeah, I never wanted to think of myself as a victim. But the third thing I realized was that even less than wanting to think of myself as a victim? Did I want to think of myself as the culprit, as the person who, who was was dishing out the disrespectful attitudes and behaviors, and so I'd been most deeply in denial about when I was the one who, who was disrespectful. And then the fourth thing that I realized is that as a leader, I saw myself as the kind of person who was creating these Bs free zones where everybody could do the best work of their life and and build the best relationships of their careers, but by by ignoring these disrespectful attitudes and behaviors that were happening on my team, I was as not living up to my own desire to be the kind of leader that I wanted to be. So that was, that was a big drink of water. And so what I wanted to do was write a book that would take a step back and sort of explain what radical respect is. Explain what gets in the way, what are the problems? And then the different things that we can do as leaders, as upstanders, as as people who have been harmed by disrespectful attitudes and behaviors and people who are sometimes disrespectful, as we are all bound to be from time to time. What can we do to get these things back out of the way so we can get back on track?

Jean Gomes:

Do we? Can we give us an example of the kind of things that that are perhaps most countercultural in how you operationalize radical respect? Yes,

Kim Scott:

I think there are three big pro I mean, there's a million problems, but I'm going to boil it down to three, bias, prejudice and bullying. And it's, I think, one of the mistakes that we make about these three problems is that we conflate them, we treat them as though they're one thing, and then the problem feels monolithic and insoluble. Oh, it's just human nature. There's nothing we can do about it, and that is not the case. So, you know, I'm sitting here in Silicon Valley. We love to solve hard problems. What do you do you do when you're confronted with a hard problem? You break it down. So let's, let's sort of take some super simple definitions for each of these. Bias is not meaning it. Prejudice is meaning it, and bullying is being mean. So bias is, I'm talking about unconscious bias. That's why I call it not meaning it. Prejudice is a very consciously held belief usually incorporate, incorporating some kind of unfair and inaccurate stereotype. And so that's why I say meaning it and and bullying is just being mean. And now that we realize, I mean, there's tons more to say about the. Bias, prejudice and bullying. But when you when you can in the moment, sort of say, I think this is bias, or I think this is prejudice, or I think this is bullying, you you realize there's different responses that you need to make if it's bias, you want to respond with an i statement, kind of pull someone in to understand things from your perspective, whereas if it is prejudice, then what you want to do is you want to respond with an IT statement. An IT statement sort of shows the boundary between one person's freedom to believe whatever they want, but they can't impose that belief on others, and if it's bullying, you want to use statement you know you can't talk. You want to push someone away from you. You want an example? Yeah, that'd be great. So a colleague of mine told me a great story about an upstander dealing with bias that happened in a meeting. She and her two colleagues were at a small company, and they were going to meet with with a very large company. And so the three of them walked into this conference room, and they were seated at this table, big, long, like 30 person conference table. She, my friend, had the expertise that was going to win her team the deal. So she sat in the center of the table, and her two colleagues sat to her left when the other side came in. The first person sat across from the guy to her left, the next person sat across from the guy to his left, and then everybody else filed on down the table, leaving her dangling. You've seen this, you're laughing. That's often how bias shows up, just sort of assumptions that we make about who sits where. And my colleagues started talking and and when the when the people from the other side had questions, they directed them, not at her, but at her, two colleagues, who were men. It happened once. It happened twice. It happened a third time. And finally, one of her colleagues stood up and he said, I think we should switch seats. That was all he had to do to totally change the dynamic in the room. And so the example of being a great upstander and using an i statement, he was sort of inviting the other folks in to understand things from his perspective. And as soon as they realized what they were doing, they knocked it off. They they didn't intend to do it. And why did why did he choose to be an upstander in the moment? I think it's worth kind of double clicking on that, because it's so important. Upstanders have such an important role to play here. First of all, he did it for practical reasons. He wanted to win the deal, and he knew if they didn't understand that she had the expertise, they wouldn't win the deal. Second of all, he did it sort of for emotional reasons. He liked her, and it kind of pissed him off that she was getting ignored. Third of all, he did it for efficiency reasons, for the sake of the people who were were being biased, because he knew it was going to be easier for them to hear it from him than from her. And fourth, he did it for sort of a self protective reason, because I don't know about you, John, but when, when I have witnessed some kind of bias or some kind of disrespectful attitude in a meeting, and I don't do anything, it's the kind of thing that wakes me up at three in the morning, you know, and I need to be sleeping at three in the morning. You suffer, if you're, if you're a silent bystander, you you don't get away, you suffer kind of a moral injury. And so those were the reasons why, why he intervened, and an i statement, you know, I think we should switch seats or, you know, I don't think you meant that the way it sounded can be a great way to intervene in bias, because it kind of holds up a mirror. But if it's prejudice, holding up a mirror is not going to work, because the other person's going to grin. Yeah, Aren't I good looking? You know, they're going to like what they see in that mirror. They believe that thing. I learned this shortly after? Well, I've learned it a lot of times, but here's one story. Shortly after I returned to work from maternity leave, I'd just given birth to twins, and after five months of maternity leave, I went back to work, and a couple of days later, I was chit chatting with a guy before a meeting, and he said to me, Oh, my wife doesn't work because it's better for the children. And of course, at this moment in time, that was like a punch in the gut to me, but I didn't think he really meant it the way that it sounded. And so I said to him, Oh, I decided to show up at work today because I want to neglect my kids. You know, I thought it was biased, and I thought that I statement would make him laugh, like you just did, and we would move on. We'd get past it. But no, he doubled down and he said, Oh no, Kim, it is really bad for your children that you are, that you've come back to work, and so now I know it's prejudice and hold. Up a mirror is not going to work and and so now need to try an IT statement. And an IT statement again, is this statement that sort of draws a line between one person's freedom. He could believe whatever he wanted. He wasn't raising my kids. I didn't care what he thought about child rearing, but he couldn't impose that on me, and I knew that he if I didn't say something more, he would impose it on me, because he might decide that I shouldn't take out of town clients, for example, or shouldn't go on work trips because I had children, and that was not his decision to make. And an IT statement can appeal to a law, it can appeal to a company policy, or it can appeal to common sense. So in this case, I chose company policy, and I said it is a violation of Google's policies for you to tell me that I'm neglecting my children by showing up at work today, and that had the desired impact. He kind of took a step back, and I said to him, Look, I'm not going to over delegate this conversation to HR. I'm not going to make a thing of it, but I think that we can agree it is my decision together. Now I'm going to appeal to common sense. It is my decision together with my partner, how we raise our children, just as it is your decision together with your wife, how you raise your children like and he kind of nodded and agreed with that, but I could tell I hadn't fully gotten through to him. And so I said, and furthermore, you don't want to read my research any more than I want to read your research. And then he and then he laughed. Finally I got the laugh, and he was like, okay, okay, you're right. And so that was an example of using an it's why an i statement doesn't work with prejudice. You really need an IT statement. But of course, if it's bullying, neither an i statement nor an IT statement is going to work. A bully's going to kick past any kind of boundary you show. That's the nature of bullying, and the last thing you want to do is use an i statement and bring that person closer to you. If they're bullying, you really want to push them away from you. I learned this from my daughter when she was in third grade. She was getting bullied at school, and I was encouraging her. I think this is a mistake that a lot of parents make, and also people at work make this all the time. Tell that. I said to her, tell this child, you know, I feel sad when you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And she banged her fist on the table, and she said, Mom, they are trying to make me feel sad. Why would I tell them they succeeded? I'm like, Oh, that's a really good point. And and so the I statement was not the right way to go in this case. So we talked about a you statement, you can't talk to me like that, or a you question, why are you behaving this way? What's going on for you here? Or even a you non sequitur, like, Where'd you get that shirt? The point of the you statement is that you're now not in a submissive role. You're in an active role. You're pushing back. You're not taking what the person said. You're making them answer your questions and and that can be, you know, it's not going to solve all the world's problems, but it can be helpful in the moment. So in the moment, here's what to say when you don't know what to say, if you think it's and you don't have to be sure, but if you think it's bias, start with the word I and see what comes out of your your mouth. Next, if you think it is, is prejudice. Start with the word it and notice what comes out of your mouth next. And if you think it is bullying, then, then start with the word you and just find out what you're going to say next.

Jean Gomes:

That's incredibly helpful to help people navigate through what is a very entwined set of problems and very difficult to pull apart. So I think you know, the kind of, the strong sense of of kind of psychological health that you project in all of this is also underlined by all of these experiences. And I'm just curious about because you're bringing, you know, management expertise and psychology, and, you know, a whole bunch of different perspectives. Where do you where do you get your source code from all of this? Where is it coming from?

Kim Scott:

When I sat down to write radical candor. You know, I'm sitting here in Silicon Valley, and so there's a lot of people that are like, You got to collect data, you got to do the research. And I was talking to a friend of mine, Michael about this, and Michael sent me this book, the ambiguities of experience, written by James March. And James March says in that book, collecting data, doing research is one way to find the truth, but it's only one way. You can also do the internal journey where you where you try to make sense of your own experiences. And I decided that that was the path I was going to take for both. Radical candor and radical respect is I was, I was just going to go as deep as I needed to go, and it took a long time, like I thought I could write radical candor in three months. And it took four years. You know, it took a long time to sort of analyze my own experiences and to try to make sense of them in a way that would be helpful for other people. So part of it was coming up with a framework. And then the stories for my career are sort of like ornaments on on the Festivus pole and and then I tried to really think hard. There was there was one. There were a lot of people who helped me, but there was one person in particular, Daniel Rubin, who used to work for me when I was at Google, who was he was a recent college grad, so he was much, much younger than I am, and he kept pushing me. He was like, OK, I get the idea, I get the story, but I don't know what to do. Tell me what to do. So I tried to get very practical, tactical about what you can do to put the ideas into practice so you don't repeat the same mistakes that I made.

Jean Gomes:

Yeah, that's really helpful. Can we blow this up a bit and start talking about the current kind of state of leadership across the world? Yes, we have got some massive tasks to kind of confront climate change with the kind of decoupling of globalization, with AI and so on. And we've got quite a few bully leaders in place across the world. What's your kind of what's your state? The Nation take on what's going on?

Kim Scott:

You know, it's interesting. When I first moved to Moscow in 1990 there was, we were at this weird moment in history where it seems like all the world's problems had been solved. You know, the Soviet Union history. Yeah, yeah, the end of history. And these I was it was not only in the Soviet Union, also apartheid in South Africa had fallen. It seems like humanity had finally learned this lesson that totalitarianism doesn't work. Not only is it evil, it's ineffective, it's brutal incompetence. And I think that what we forgot in that moment is that chaos is also brutally incompetent and and what happens in in chaotic situations, which is what happened at, I think, at the end of as the Soviet Union collapsed, is that leaders like Putin. And I'm not even gonna call him people bullies like Putin. I'm not gonna give him the title leader. I'm gonna correct myself here. You know, authoritarian bullies take hold, and it's what it's basically nasty, brutish and short, you know, and the whole purpose, I think, of leadership, is to prevent those bullies from taking hold, and in order to prevent the leaders from becoming the bullies, we have checks and balances. And this is like pretty well, pretty well understood. And yet, at this moment in history, I think our checks and balances are failing us and and the the petty bullies are becoming tyrannical leaders, and we've seen it happen. We've watched it. I'm gonna, I like to when I when I use biased language, I wave a purple flag. So purple flag notice I'm we. We've noticed it, we've understood it, watched it happen and read about it happening in Russia with Putin and it is, it is terrible, like it's terrible for the people of Russia. I have so many friends in Russia who are suffering as a result of what's happening there. So it's not good. It's not like, it's good for Russia, it's not even good for Russia's billionaires, like, it's not good for almost anyone there. And it's, it's dangerous, and I'm worried that it's happening all over the world, that that, that that people are getting elected, and then they're the checks and balances on those people's power are failing. And I think part of the reason why checks and balances are failing is that we have created political checks and balances, but we haven't created economic checks and balances, and when people can become infinitely rich, they they get too much power and and certainly I'm, I'm operating in a part of the world where that is happening to I mean, it's happening with tech companies, but, but it's happening all over the world, and I. We will, we will suffer if we allow this to happen. It is in our it is in our power to stop it, and we must stop it, because an authoritarian regime is terrible for the economy. It is terrible for humanity, and it's even terrible for the authoritarian, authoritarian bully who takes over in the in the end, usually, I don't know why we why we let it happen, but we're letting it happen, and we got to stop

Sara Deschamps:

it. If the conversations we've been having on the evolving leader have helped you in any way, please share this episode with your network friends and family. Thank you so much for listening. Now let's get back to the conversation.

Jean Gomes:

Let's think about the next generation of people who are going to inherit the mantle of leadership, and particularly the kind of Gen Z and younger. How can we accelerate the maturation of people so that these these things, we can learn them sooner? I

Kim Scott:

think if we go back to that story about my daughter getting bullied in third grade, I don't think schools take enough. They don't take bullying seriously enough. I'll give you another example my son, I guess he was in sixth, sixth or seventh, seventh grade, and I was looking at how they explained to the kids how they gave them a grade. And you know, some percentage was the exam, some some percentage was the tests and the homework, some percentage was class participation, and 15% was like how you treated your colleagues, your classmates. That meant you could get away with bullying if you wanted to in that classroom, and that you might even get rewards for participation by by being the bloviating bully in the classroom. And that is really deeply problematic. And the solution to that is, I was working at one tech company, and they had a very different I mean, wasn't a grading system, but it was a performance review system. You got reviewed on your results, on your innovation and on your teamwork. And if you got a bad rating for teamwork, that was your rating, no matter how good your results were. That is how it needs to be. And it needs to be that way, early, early, early on. We really need to intervene in bullying, much, much, much earlier, I think, in school. So I think that is really important. I also think that it is. It's so tip. So I'm 56 and it's so tempting to say, ah, you know, my 15 year old twins are going to solve all these problems. You know, I'm, I'm kind of and, and that's, that's not fair. I think that it is our job as the older generation to own the mistakes that have been made and and, you know, first of all, to be wide open, to solicit feedback from the younger generation and and to learn from them, and also to share our wisdom and to stay in the game, I think, you know, we've, we've created a hot mess, literally, for our kids to fix and and we're staying healthy longer. So we need to, we need to stay in the game, but also know when to step aside when we're too old to stay in the game. We need to be relevant right now. Yes, yes, we need to know when to hand over, because we're going to be around longer, longer and longer. But that doesn't mean we need to hold on to power. We need to, I think one of the great, one of the great moments in Hamilton was when King George is observing that Washington stepped aside and let someone else run. And he, you know, and he sings, you know, I didn't know Zach was a saying that one could do. And I think, like, if there, there's, there's this country has made so many mistakes, but we've gotten some things right, and having our first president step down and let someone else run and not hold on to power was one of the things we got right. And we need to see more of that.

Scott Allender:

So Kim, as we come to the end of our time together, can we think about your legacy and what you're doing, what is it that you're hoping to bring about as a change in leadership?

Kim Scott:

I think that for so long, we felt like command and control. What. As a good leadership approach, and I believe that command and control not only winds up hurting people, it hurts results. It is ineffective. It's brutally incompetent. And so what I hope that we can do is learn how to create collaboration hierarchies. I think structure is necessary for people to work together. Structure is necessary so we need a hierarchy, but we need a collaboration hierarchy. We do not need a dominance hierarchy. I think that, you know, lobsters need dominance hierarchies, but we are human beings. We are higher order thinkers, and we can and must do better, and when we learn how to create a collaboration hierarchy that honors everyone's individuality, then we get teams on which the strength of the team is the individual, and the strength of the individual comes from The team where you get the best of both collaboration and individualism, you don't have to choose between those things, and I think that the sooner we learn that lesson, the more able we will be to come together and and solve the very big problems that we have got to begin addressing as as humanity

Jean Gomes:

wonderful. What's next for you? Kim,

Kim Scott:

I am writing a utopian novel in which I imagine that we have done just that. So, you know, I was very optimistic growing up, and I think that that was helpful for me in my career, but I found, I have found that my my kids and their friends, as I mentioned, I have twins. They're 15 now, they're very pessimistic about the future, and I think it's going to hurt them. So I want to paint a picture, not only for my kids, but for all of us that we can get this right. It is possible. It is within our grasp to get this right, and let's do it like let's stop all this. Let's prevent the nonsense from taking over. It is not it is not necessary, but it could happen. It could absolutely happen, and I'm terrified about what could happen in the United States if, if Trump wins, I think it will be the end of of democracy as we know it.

Jean Gomes:

Yeah, certainly does present a lot of very intractable problems for vast parts of the economy in vast parts of society, if we get leaders who want to dismantle the structures that we spent all these decades building, yeah, I think one of the things that we've been wondering about on the show is this rise in the zero sum mindset, and particularly amongst youngsters, because when you grow up in an environment where the economy is down, where where leaders are failing, then you know other people's gains are seen as your losses, and that creates a very, you know, diminished kind of future for people you know, and even if you are succeeding, you feel like you're succeeding at the cost of somebody else, which means that your success doesn't feel happy and doesn't feel and that that creates a dynamic of guilt and shame and all sorts of other weird things playing out. So I do love the idea of the kind of utopian thought experiment. But I think, you know, from from our perspective, what we're trying to encourage, really, is this, like, how do we develop more positive some mindsets, yes, around the big challenges facing us? So we don't, we don't always make it in either or,

Kim Scott:

yeah, let's grow the pie, and let's grow the pie in a way that doesn't destroy the Earth, which ultimately will will burn the pie. And it is, it's absolutely possible to do that. But I think we really I think a big part of the answer for me is economic checks and balances. People can't get infinitely rich. Here's, here's another example of this. So I I was just reading about Boeing being found guilty, which I think was correct, and, and, and one of the things that the judge ordered was that the board that the board members of Boeing meet with the families of the victims, which I also think is a good thing for the judge to do. And at the same time, I think that we were in this situation where every economic incentive that those board members had was to, you know, save, you know, the way our economy they were, they were playing the game the way we've told them to. Play the game, and then when the when the perfectly predictable results happen, we blame them as these immoral people, and I think the game itself has got to be changed. We've got to begin to incorporate costs, the sort of externalities that happen, into business. Because if we don't, you know if, if, if a company can dump whatever it wants into the rivers and doesn't have to pay the cost of of contaminating the water, if companies can pollute the earth and create global warming, but don't have to cover the costs of global warming, then capitalism is broken. Like you know, if a couple of if a few people can become so wealthy that they have an undue influence over elections, we don't have political checks and balances anymore. So, so I also hope to be able to affect that, but I don't know if writing a novel is the best way to make that change, but I'm open to other suggestions. I'll follow anybody who has, who has a better way for me to use my time, but that's what I'm doing right now. Do

Jean Gomes:

you think you're you'll one day move into politics? No,

Kim Scott:

I don't. I mean, I think what I'm best at is writing and and this, by the way, Corey Doctorow wrote this great book called choke point capitalism, which I really recommend to everyone. One of the problems with our economy is that it makes it it is irrational for me to do what I do like it was irrational. It was economically absolutely irrational for me to sit down and write radical candor and radical respect like I walked away from 10s of millions of dollars in stock options to get paid a lot, many zeros less than that, to write, to write the book, to write both of those books. And I did it because I made myself a solemn promise when I was at business school that once I had bought the house where I lived and could pay for my kids college, I was going to stop working for money, because that like our economic system is, and I was going to do what I thought, what I wanted to do, what I thought would would help other people, and what I genuinely enjoyed doing, and I'm glad that I did that, but I think that it we shouldn't have to make economically irrational choices in order to do the work that we want to do that's going to be most productive. And I think that our our economy is we need, we need some some changes in the way that we need capitalism constrained. We

Jean Gomes:

We need Kim Scott to keep thinking and writing and sharing and inspiring people with these ideas, because that's the only way forward. Ideas change the world, really, didn't they? Yes,

Kim Scott:

well, and look, why do I have the opportunity to do this? It's because I won the lottery. There's a lot of other people who could probably have many better ideas, who can't afford to just make the economically irrational decision. I could afford to do that because I won the lottery. And my hope we're both in tech at the moment in time and we both won the lottery. We need more we need more people thinking on this problem and and you shouldn't have to have won the lottery in order to have the freedom to think. I

Jean Gomes:

totally agree well on that point, Kim, we are so delighted to have spent this time with you. Wish we could have more, and hopefully at some point, we'll have you back, if you're willing to rejoin us to talk about your next work and the all the lessons that you're learning. I think the practicality of some of the things you brought into this conversation are tremendous, and I know that we'll get some amazing feedback from that. So I really thank you, and we look forward to talking again.

Kim Scott:

Thank you so much. Really enjoyed the conversation. Okay,

Scott Allender:

folks, if you haven't already stop what you're doing and order both of Kim's books today, radical candor and radical respect, you will be glad you did and until next time, remember the world is evolving. Are you? You?

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